Susan Nova, Correspondent

Published 2:04 am, Thursday, May 20, 2010

An enigma within a mystery, the whereabouts of the 103-year-old owner of Le Beau Chateau on 52 acres in New Canaan remain unknown. Holding ownership for more than a half-century, Huguette Clark has never lived in the 1937 mansion.

Originally priced at $34 million, the property -- listed by Barbara Cleary whose New Canaan Realty Guild, a Christie's affiliate, carries her name -- now has an asking price of $24 million. The estate also is being marketed through Christie's Great Estates global network. An approved subdivision has 10 buildable lots, ranging from 4.1 to 7.9 acres.

The estate was built by U.S. Sen. David Aiken Reed of Pennsylvania, who spent more than a year on construction of the mansion, whose cost at the time was said to be $275,000. A major in the artillery in World War I, a lawyer and a two-term senator, he was co-author of the Immigration Act of 1924, restricting the movement of Eastern and Southern Europeans to the United States, and prohibiting Asian-Pacific immigration.

The architects of the home were Voorhees, Gmelin and Walker of New York. Founded in 1885, the firm was noted for skyscrapers in the Art Deco style, among them 1 Wall St. in Manhattan and the distinctive Times Square Building in Rochester, N.Y., whose 12 stories support four aluminum wings, each weighing 12,000 pounds. The building contractor was the former Miller-Reed Co. of Norwalk and New York.

"Among the unusual features: are a linen chamber, the walls of which bear glass-enclosed shelves; a chamber in the basement for the drying of draperies; air conditioning for the dining and living rooms, and chromium-plated tubes in all bathrooms for drying and warming towels," said the N.Y. Times in an article published in 1938.

There also was a conservatory and a horticultural laboratory with a refrigerator dedicated to cut flowers.

Fourteen years later, it was purchased by Clark, who owned a 42-room, 15,000 square foot Manhattan apartment at 72nd Street and Fifth Avenue and Bellosguardo, a 21-room home on 23 waterview acres in Santa Barbara, Calif., together valued today at more than $100 million. Clark added a wing to the New Canaan mansion but never moved in, according to a recent MSNBC show by Pulitzer-Prize winner Bill Dedman.

Huguette's father, once the second richest man in the United States, owned banks, railroads, newspapers, timber, sugar, coffee, oil, gold, silver and seemingly unending supplies of copper, including the United Verde Copper Mine in Jerome, Ariz., which produced profits of $10 million monthly in 2010 dollars, according to the show.

Clark, one of three Copper Kings of Butte, Mont., did not start out with great wealth. He was born in a log cabin in Connellsville, Pa., in 1839. After panning for gold in Montana, with modest success, he began to sell goods he hauled through the Rocky Mountains to other miners at a hefty mark-up. When he died, his estate was valued at more than $3.6 billion, in today's dollars.

Today, a father-and-son duo live in matching one-level, two-bedroom brick cottages on the New Canaan estate and maintain the house and grounds.

Swathed in white-washed brick and roofed in slate, the 12,766-square-foot Le Beau Chateau in French manor-house style, has nine bedrooms, seven baths, two powder rooms, two second-floor sitting rooms, 11 marble fireplaces, a wine cellar, a trunk room, an elevator, a walk-in vault and a ballroom, according to Cleary.

Floors are of marble and hardwood in herringbone patterns, and the walls are plaster. Ceilings soar to 13 feet, the windowsills are of marble, and the main stairway is a sinuous spiral with custom wrought-iron railings. As you might expect, rooms are of generous size.

The entry is 30 feet by 21 feet, as is the dining room, the music room is larger still at 35 feet by 23 feet, and the master bedroom's sitting room is 36 1/2 by 24 feet.